The Insider News

The Insider News is for breaking IT and Software development news. Post your news, your alerts and
your inside scoops. This is an IT news-only forum - all off-topic, non-news posts will be
removed. If you wish to ask a programming question please post it
here.

Get The Daily Insider direct to your mailbox every day. Subscribe
now!

Some analysts have described Office 2013 as a minor improvement to previous versions of Office and in some ways I agree. However, I think Office 2013 is a worthwhile upgrade. The ability to convert PDF files to editable Word documents will likely prove very handy and having Outlook remind users when they forget message attachments should save time, frustration and embarrassment. All in all, I really like what Microsoft has done with Office 2013 and I feel good about recommending it.

Intel has scaled back plans for the next version of Itanium in a move that raises questions about the future of the 64-bit server chip, used primarily in Hewlett-Packard's high-end Integrity servers. In a short notice posted quietly to its website on January 31, Intel said the next version of Itanium, codenamed Kittson, will be produced on a 32 nanometer manufacturing process, like the current version of Itanium, instead of on a more advanced process, as it had previously planned.

Is the problem demand for chips, demand for servers... or demand for Intel-based servers?

When the Federal Trade Commission told the public it would give $50,000 to anyone who could devise an effective and convenient way to stop telemarketing robocalls, proposals from more than 700 would-be inventors came in.

OK, you've got us. The jig is up. There is no use for absurdly large prime numbers—yet (we’ll explain that eventually). Slightly less ludicrous prime numbers do have a point, which we'll describe here. One modern-day instance of practical use for prime numbers is in RSA encryption, which allows two parties to pass secret messages back and forth using independent encryption and decryption codes. In RSA, someone who wants to receive a private message will publish a product of two large prime numbers as their "public key," which senders can use to encrypt messages intended for the key publisher.